Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Google's April Fools' Day Hoaxes for 2008

Google does have a long historyof April Fools' Day hoaxes, but this year there's something different: many Google offices from outside of US have created their own tricks - to confuse all the watchers at google.com

The first permanent human colony on MarsGoogle's main blogdid make an announcement about Virgle. "Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars." (Check this Video too)

Google Future SearchGoogle Australia announces gDay (a.k.a. Future Search), it is a brand new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time(are u crazy!! - but it's april fool's day). Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. They claim that using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, they have created a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now. Now that's Star Trek theory.Google Docs AirplaneGoogle Docs comes up with a new option: create a new airplane. For now, the only model available is the one below - but that's pretty cool (makes me remember my school days):

Gmail Custom Time OptionGmail has an extra option that lets you to change the past with Gmail Custom Time. "Just click Set custom time from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient's inbox."

How about capturing a book's smellGoogle Book Search has a cool new feature: capturing a book's smell. It reads as "I'm pleased to let you know that we've made some headway with one type of volume we've struggled with in the past: books employing scratch-and-sniff technology(kinda doggy). Using special equipment and tricky JavaScript, we're now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process and then embed them in your web browser when you preview these titles in Google Book Search."

Finally we have Google Talk that's gone greenThey have launched a bot that translates conversations into the IM lingo. "In honor of Earth Day (3 weeks from today: April 22, 2008), on that day our Google Talk servers will start automatically sending your conversations using IM-speak instead of normal words. We know you'll all want to practice your IM-speak, so we're helping by introducing a new translation bot, en2im@bot.talk.google.com, which will translate your conversations into IM-speak, to help you get used to the new lingo." LOL!